Monday, July 15. 2013Did Al Gore Invent the Internet? No, Nikola Tesla Did
Via The Huffington Post (via Nikola Jankovic) -----
What do you do when you have annoyed J.P. Morgan, the most powerful man on Wall Street? This question was very much on the mind of Nikola Tesla in January 1902. An electrical inventor, Tesla had been born in 1856 to a Serbian family living in what is today Croatia. In 1884 Tesla had emigrated to America to work for Thomas Edison, but he soon quit in order to pursue his dream of an alternating current motor. After selling this invention to George Westinghouse, Tesla had gone on in the 1890s to be one of the first to study radio waves, prompting him to perform demonstrations where he took shocks of 250,000 volts as well as to create 100-foot lightning bolts while working in Colorado Springs in 1899. While in Colorado, Tesla convinced himself that it would be possible to send power around the world without using wires.
Tesla in his experimental station in Colorado Springs, December 1899. He is seated in his magnifying transmitter (known today as a giant Tesla coil), with an electrical discharge passing from the secondary coil to another coil. This picture was a double exposure on a single glass plate; Tesla was first photographed sitting in the chair and then the magnifying transmitter was turned on.
The challenge facing Tesla in 1902 was that, although Morgan had given him $150,000 to build a laboratory at Wardenclyffe, Long Island in order to send power and messages across the Atlantic, Guglielmo Marconi had beaten him to the punch. In December 1901, Marconi announced that the Morse code signal for the letter "S" had been transmitted from England and received in Newfoundland. Marconi, not Tesla, was the new wunderkind of radio. So what did Tesla tell his patron Morgan? Along with complaining how Marconi had stolen his circuit designs, Tesla proposed to Morgan in 1902 a plan for a "World Telegraphy System" in which a number of transmitting stations would collect news and broadcast to customers via individual receivers. As Tesla boasted to Morgan: The fundamental idea underlying this system is to employ a few power plants, preferably located near the large centers of civilization and each capable of transmitting a message to the remotest regions of the globe. These plants . . . as fast as they receive the news, they pour [it] into the ground, through which [it] spreads instantly. The whole earth is like a brain, as it were, and the capacity of this system is infinite, for the energy received on every few square feet of ground is sufficient to operate an instrument, and the number of devices which can be so actuated is. . . . infinite. You see, Mr. Morgan, the revolutionary character of this idea, its civilizing potency, its tremendous money-making power. Tesla confidentially told Morgan that they would make money by manufacturing receivers, and by far his most imaginative idea for a receiver was a handheld device connected to a short pole or even a lady's parasol so that it could pick up voice messages anywhere in the world. As Tesla promised in 1904, "An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered, or music played in some other place, however, distant." Here in the opening years of the 20th century, Tesla conjured up a device much like a transistor radio or cell phone, with the promise of providing instantaneous access to information anytime, anywhere. So what became of Tesla's vision of a World Telegraphy System? Ever the hard-headed banker, Morgan was not persuaded by visions of information flowing through the earth and he refused to invest further in Tesla's Long Island lab. Tesla struggled for a few more years, only to discover that it was incredibly difficult to "get a grip of the earth" and pump oscillating currents into the earth's crust. Distressed that he could not square physical reality with what he could see so clearly in his mind, Tesla suffered a nervous breakdown in 1905. A broken man, Tesla died in 1943 in a New York City hotel room, penniless and forgotten. Over the last 20 years, Tesla has enjoyed a comeback in popular culture, celebrated as a Don Quixote-like hero who did battle with business titans like Edison and Morgan. Late last summer, Matt Inman used his online comic, The Oatmeal, to raise $1.4 million by crowd-sourcing so that a private group, the Tesla Science Center, could save Tesla's laboratory on Long Island.
"Tesla's Wireless Transmitting Tower, 185 feet high, at Wardenclyffe, N. Y., from which the city of New York will be fed with electricity, and by means of which the camperout [sic], the yachtsman and summer resort visitor will be able to communicate instantly with friends at home." From "Tesla's Tower," New York American, 22 May 1904 in The Tesla Collection, 23 vols., comp. Iwona Vujovic, (New York: Tesla Project, 1998), 17:11.
More than seeing Tesla as a flighty crank who never finished anything, we should appreciate his early insight about the coming of the Information Age. Although he was certainly not thinking about the computers, software, and packet-switching necessary to create the Web, his fundamental idea that all information should be collected and disseminated around the world is very much what the Internet and World Wide Web has come to be in our time. "I think we all misunderstood Tesla. We thought he was a dreamer and visionary," wrote fellow engineer John Stone Stone in 1915. "He did dream and his dreams came true, he did have visions but they were of a real future, not an imaginary one." Stone understood only too well that without such bold visions practical engineers cannot build the future.
W. Bernard Carlson is Professor and Chair of the Engineering and Society Department at the University of Virginia. A historian of technology and business, he has published widely on invention and entrepreneurship, and his newest book is Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, published by Princeton University Press.
Related Links:Personal comment: Was Nikola Tesla a visionary scientist, a magician or an artist (creating "technologically sublime" artifacts --artificial daylight, artificial lightnings--)? Or all of them at once?
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
at
08:58
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, communication, culture & society, history, research, science & technology
Saturday, July 06. 2013How to Make an Implant that Improves the Brain
----- By Loren M. Frank
Enhancing the flow of information through the brain could be crucial to making neuroprosthetics practical.
The abilities to learn, remember, evaluate, and decide are central to who we are and how we live. Damage to or dysfunction of the brain circuitry that supports these functions can be devastating, leading to Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, PTSD, or many other disorders. Current treatments, which are drug-based or behavioral, have limited efficacy in treating these problems. There is a pressing need for something more effective. One promising approach is to build an interactive device to help the brain learn, remember, evaluate, and decide. One might, for example, construct a system that would identify patterns of brain activity tied to particular experiences and then, when called upon, impose those patterns on the brain. Ted Berger, Sam Deadwyler, Robert Hampsom, and colleagues have used this approach (see “Memory Implants”). They are able to identify and then impose, via electrical stimulation, specific patterns of brain activity that improve a rat’s performance in a memory task. They have also shown that in monkeys stimulation can help the animal perform a task where it must remember a particular item. Their ability to improve performance is impressive. However, there are fundamental limitations to an approach where the desired neural pattern must be known and then imposed. The animals used in their studies were trained to do a single task for weeks or months and the stimulation was customized to produce the right outcome for that task. This is only feasible for a few well-learned experiences in a predictable and constrained environment. New and complex experiences engage large numbers of neurons scattered across multiple brain regions. These individual neurons are physically adjacent to other neurons that contribute to other memories, so selectively stimulating the right neurons is difficult if not impossible. And to make matters even more challenging, the set of neurons involved in storing a particular memory can evolve as that memory is processed in the brain. As a result, imposing the right patterns for all desired experiences, both past and future, requires technology far beyond what is possible today. I believe the answer to be an alternative approach based on enhancing flows of information through the brain. The importance of information flow can be appreciated when we consider how the brain makes and uses memories. During learning, information from the outside world drives brain activity and changes in the connections between neurons. This occurs most prominently in the hippocampus, a brain structure critical for laying down memories for the events of daily life. Thus, during learning, external information must flow to the hippocampus if memories are to be stored. Once information has been stored in the hippocampus, a different flow of information is required to create a long-lasting memory. During periods of rest and sleep, the hippocampus “reactivates” stored memories, driving activity throughout the rest of the brain. Current theories suggest that the hippocampus acts like a teacher, repeatedly sending out what it has learned to the rest of the brain to help engrain memories in more stable and distributed brain networks. This “consolidation” process depends on the flow of internal information from the hippocampus to the rest of the brain. Finally, when a memory is retrieved a similar pattern of internally driven flow is required. For many memories, the hippocampus is required for memory retrieval, and once again hippocampal activity drives the reinstatement of the memory pattern throughout the brain. This process depends on the same hippocampal reactivation events that contribute to memory consolidation. Different flows of information can be engaged at different intensities as well. Some memories stay with us and guide our choices for a lifetime, while others fade with time. We and others have shown that new and rewarded experiences drive both profound changes in brain activity, and strong memory reactivation. Familiar and unrewarded experiences drive smaller changes and weaker reactivation. Further, we have recently shown that the intensity of memory reactivation in the hippocampus, measured as the number of neurons active together during each reactivation event, can predict whether an the next decision an animal makes is going to be right or wrong. Our findings suggest that when the animal reactivates effectively, it does a better job of considering possible future options (based on past experiences) and then makes better choices. These results point to an alternative approach to helping the brain learn, remember and decide more effectively. Instead of imposing a specific pattern for each experience, we could enhance the flow of information to the hippocampus during learning and the intensity of memory reactivation from the hippocampus during memory consolidation and retrieval. We are able to detect signatures of different flows of information associated with learning and remembering. We are also beginning to understand the circuits that control this flow, which include neuromodulatory regions that are often damaged in disease states. Importantly, these modulatory circuits are more localized and easier to manipulate than the distributed populations of neurons in the hippocampus and elsewhere that are activated for each specific experience. Thus, an effective cognitive neuroprosthetic would detect what the brain is trying to do (learn, consolidate or retrieve) and then amplify activity in the relevant control circuits to enhance the essential flows of information. We know that even in diseases like Alzheimer’s where there is substantial damage to the brain, patients have good days and bad days. On good days the brain smoothly transitions among distinct functions, each associated with a particular flow of information. On bad days these functions may become less distinct and the flows of information muddled. Our goal then, would be to restore the flows of information underlying different mental functions. A prosthetic device has the potential to adapt to the moment-by-moment changes in information flow necessary for different types of mental processing. By contrast, drugs that seek to treat cognitive dysfunction may effectively amplify one type of processing but cannot adapt to the dynamic requirements of mental function. Thus, constructing a device that makes the brain’s control circuits work more effectively offers a powerful approach to treating disease and maximizing mental capacity.
Loren M. Frank is a professor at the Center for Integrative Neuroscience and the Department of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
at
11:11
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, information, knowledge, neurosciences, science & technology
Thursday, July 04. 2013How Energy Consumption Has Changed Since 1776
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The U.S. Energy Information Administration reviews big changes in energy use since the Declaration of Independence. By Kevin Bullis
Energy independence: Since the colonies parted from Britain there have been big changes in energy use. It’s easy to forget just how recently we started using fossil fuels in large amounts. In honor of the July 4th holiday, the U.S. Energy Information has produced a chart showing how rapidly the country shifted from using wood almost exclusively as an energy source to using first coal, then petroleum and natural gas. Here’s a couple of notable things about the chart. The first is the obvious staying power of coal (see “The Enduring Technology of Coal”). Coal wasn’t used in significant amounts until the mid-1800s, but then it increases quickly (and with it, overall energy consumption increases by about 5 times). When oil is introduced, it seems to displace coal, leading to a sharp drop in coal consumption. But coal use quickly recovers. A similar drop occurs when natural gas consumption starts to rise. But within a couple of decades coal use is growing again. Near the end of the chart coal use drops off again as natural gas production surges–a result of fracking technology. What the chart doesn’t show is that the EIA expects coal consumption to go up again this year. The stuff is cheap, and we seem to keep finding ways to use it. President Obama recently praised the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions that the surge of natural gas production enabled (see “A Drop in U.S. CO2 Emissions” and “Obama Orders EPA to Regulate Power Plants in Wide-Ranging Climate Plan”). Given the resilience of coal, though, it’s hard to be optimistic that the decreased rate of emissions will persist—absent regulations that prevent it. One other interesting bit. Renewables such as wind and solar power now produce more energy than was consumed in the mid-1800s. So if we want a society that runs completely on these renewables, all we have to do is reduce the population to what it was then, only use as much energy as they did, stop flying airplanes (big ones require oil), stop industrial processes that require energy in forms other than electricity, and only drive electric vehicles or ride horses. I may have left something out. The good news is renewables are increasing fast. But if history is a guide, the introduction of a new energy source doesn’t cause the other sources of energy to decrease, at least not in the long run. Even wood consumption has close to what it was in the 1800s, even though it’s less convenient in many ways that fossil fuels. Introducing new sources of energy seems to allow overall energy consumption to increase. Absent regulations or political crises that cause the cost of fossil fuels to rise, as technological advances make renewable energy cheaper we’ll use it more, but we’ll likely keep using more of the other sources of energy, too. Indeed, the EIA predicts that in 2040, 75% pf U.S. energy will still come from oil, coal, and natural gas.
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